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House prices are significantly higher in NSW, as are borrowing commitments, Martin North says. Photo: Bloomberg

The 2010 act provides the protective rails that might guard against a repeat of the corporate and financial excesses that triggered the 2008-09 global financial crisis, by attempting to rein in the wild mortgage practices and risky bets that contributed to so many of Trump's forgotten people losing their jobs, retirement savings and homes.

The act also authorised the government to wind up big financial firms that are in trouble; to monitor threats to the financial system; and to oversee the huge and complex derivatives market, the crazy ways of which also fuelled the financial crisis.

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Also on Trump's chopping block is the arcanely titled Fiduciary Rule – it requires retirement financial advisers to act decently and put the interests of their clients above their own in a market with an estimated value of $US25 trillion ($32 trillion).

US President Donald Trump signs an executive order calling for a rewriting of major provisions of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. Photo: New York Times

Trump closed out his campaign with a searing advertisement in which he warned against a "corrupt establishment". Speaking over images of Wall Street and casting the likes of Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein as lepers, Trump railed against "a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class – stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations".

And on inauguration day, Trump kept "the establishment" in his sights: "The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs, and while they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land."

But by the yardstick of his campaign rhetoric, effluent is flooding back in – Steven Mnuchin, his pick for treasury secretary, Gary Cohn, chair of his national economic council, and Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, are all Goldman Sachs veterans. Other "establishment" billionaires have been welcomed to the corridors of power too.

Then-president Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. Photo: New York Times

Remember Trump's blast at hedge fund managers – "paper pushers" who "get away with murder"? The half-billionaire Mnuchin is a hedge fund manager who salivates as he promises to "kill" Dodd-Frank.

Then there's Jamie Dimon, a senior banker who Trump singled out in a reverential mention during a White House pow-wow for the Wall Street establishment last week: "There's nobody better to tell me about Dodd-Frank than Jamie, so you're going to tell me about it."

Former Goldman Sachs president Gary Cohn is Trump's national economic council chief and appears to have rising influence. Photo: Bloomberg

As CEO of the country's biggest bank, Dimon is well known to financial regulators. In the years since the global financial crisis, his JP Morgan Chase has paid almost $US30 billion in fines for its dodgy dealing. Correct – billions with a B.

And breaking that figure down reveals a certain versatility in screw-you banking – $US13.4 billion for lying to investors about its mortgages; $US5.3 billion for illegal foreclosures – using fake documents to kick Americans out of their homes; $US2.1 billion for violating US sanction laws on terrorism and WMD proliferation; $US614 million for defrauding the US government; $US300 million for manipulating interest rates; $US410 million for fixing the energy markets; $US267 million for undisclosed conflicts of interest; and $3.95 billion for assorted other violations.

In the ructions over Trump's migration crackdown, the President's scene-setting for doing away with Dodd-Frank and the Fiduciary Rule has garnered little attention in the midst of a blizzard of executive orders, memorandums and declarations of intent.

In the Obama years, an army of corporate lobbyists and lawyers invested hundreds of millions of dollars fighting Dodd-Frank – as it went through congress and again in a subsequent, tortuous process of drafting the regulation through which the Act was being implemented.

Dodd-Frank also established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a heroic agency that has clawed back more than $US12 billion for millions of "forgotten" Americans who were victims of abusive mortgage, credit-card and other lending vehicles by "establishment" financial institutions that continued their robber baron ways after the Great Recession.

Trump parses his economic plans as help for both Wall Street and workers, by releasing them from regulatory constraints to allow banks to lend more to companies, which, he says, will then hire more workers.

"We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank, because frankly, I have so many people, friends of mine that had nice businesses, they can't borrow money," Trump said during a meeting with business leaders in the State Dining Room at the White House.

"They just can't get any money because the banks just won't let them borrow it because of the rules and regulations in Dodd-Frank."

In truth, in talking about "nice businesses" that can't borrow Trump appears to be talking about himself – much of his recent borrowing have been from the German Deutsche Bank, because after his serial defaults and bankruptcies American banks shied away from lending to him; and surveys show that as few as 4 per cent of small businesses, a historic low, are unhappy with current loan availability.

In a derisory attack on the Fiduciary Rule, Trump's new national economic council chief Gary Cohn told The Wall Street Journal: "We think it's a bad rule … like putting only health food on the menu, because unhealthy food tastes good. But you still shouldn't eat it because you might die younger."

Sticking to his restaurant analogy, Cohn described Trump's reform pronouncement as a "table setter for a bunch of stuff that is coming, [including] dismantling the Dodd-Frank Act and replace it with new policies to encourage economic growth and job creation.

"Americans are going to have better choices and Americans are going to have better products because we're not going to burden the banks with literally hundreds of billions of dollars of regulatory costs every year," he told the Journal.

But New York Times economics commentator Paul Krugman turned Cohn's restaurant analogy on its head. Denouncing Trump's economic policies as empowering ethically challenged businesses to cheat and exploit "the little guy", he writes: "If you want a better analogy, it's like preventing restaurants from claiming that their 1400-calorie portions are health food."

In 2015, an Obama administration study found that the kind of "conflicted investment advice" that would become illegal under the Fiduciary Rule reduced total earning for retirees by about 1 per cent – that's a whopping $US17 billion a year that, Krugman points out, mostly ends up in the pockets of financial-industry players.

"The administration apparently plans to turn over financial regulation to Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs, and make it easier for them and other big banks like Wells Fargo to steal from their customers and destabilise the economy," says Lisa Donner, the executive director of Americans for Financial Reform. "That betrays the promises Trump made to stand up to Wall Street."

Captured at the height of last year's election campaign, the Wells Fargo scandal, alluded to by Donner, was a credibility-enhancing scalp for the fledgling CFPB. Wells Fargo, with 40 million retail customers, was fined $US185 million for a scam in which the bank signed millions of customers up for accounts, credit cards, and services without their consent or knowledge – an industrial scale machine for raking in extra fees that known by the industry term "cross selling".

The bank sacked more than 5000 lowly staffers. But senior executives got off scot-free, provoking a sensational showdown at a Senate hearing in September 2016, in which Massachusetts senator and consumer-protection firebrand Elizabeth Warren eviscerated Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf.

Reminding many Democrats of why she would have been a more effective Democratic presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton, Warren opened by focusing on an oft-stated Stumpf claim: "I am accountable."

Warren: … what have you actually done to hold yourself accountable? Have you resigned as CEO or chairman of Wells Fargo?

Stumpf: No, I have not.

Warren: Alright. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on?

Stumpf: Well, first of all, this was by 1 per cent of our people.

Warren: That's not my question. This is about responsibility. Have you returned one nickel of the millions of dollars that you were paid while this scam was going on? [...]

Warren: OK, so you haven't resigned, you haven't returned a single nickel of your personal earnings, you haven't fired a single senior executive. Instead evidently your definition of "accountable" is to push the blame to your low-level employees who don't have the money for a fancy PR firm to defend themselves. It's gutless leadership …

"You know, here is what really gets me about this, Mr Stumpf. If one of your tellers took a handful of $20 bills out of the cash drawer, they probably would be looking at criminal charges for theft.

"They could end up in prison. But you squeezed your employees to the breaking point so they would cheat customers and you could drive up the value of your stock and put hundreds of millions of dollars in your own pocket.

"And when it all blew up, you kept your job, you kept your multimillion-dollar bonuses and you went on television to blame thousands of $12 an hour employees who were just trying to meet cross-sell quotas that made you rich. This is about accountability. You should resign …

"But Wall Street executives almost never hold themselves accountable.

"Not now, and not in 2008 when they crushed the worldwide economy."

After that Stumpf was shamed into quitting. But Wall Street being what it is, Stumpf was "let go", to coin that quaint Americanism for being sacked, with a $US130-plus million package to salve his wounded dignity.

Trump does not have the power to dispatch Dodd-Frank with a stroke of his presidential pen – because it is an act of Congress. But Republicans have signalled that in the face of resistance in Congress, they would resort to a time-honoured practice of neutering the act, by chipping away at the regulations and crippling the agencies that implement them by slashing their funding.

In laying out his plan to euthanise the Dodd-Frank Act, Trump declared: "The American dream is back."

As Wall Street waged guerilla warfare on the Dodd-Frank Act in 2009, then-president Barack Obama, for whom saving the economy after the 2008-09 financial crisis and Dodd-Frank are legacy jewels, famously remarked: "I didn't run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street."

Fast forward to the 2016 presidential campaign, and Americans would be forgiven for thinking Trump was saying the same thing. But there you go…